10

It was the second time Haruyuki had visited the Unlimited Neutral Field, the infinite world built above the Normal Duel Field, and his first time diving there alone.

Under the faint yellow sky, the view of the reddish-brown megaliths lined up had a Wasteland vibe somehow. But this world employed a “Change” system, and so its characteristics switched periodically. Haruyuki ran intently along the dry earth to attempt to reach the rendezvous point while there were still good footholds.

Whatever the characteristics, the terrain of the accelerated world conformed to the real Tokyo. The ring road Kannana Street existed as a wide, dry valley, tucked in between the groups of megaliths.

As he raced forward, choosing the shadow of the rocks and avoiding the center of the road, Haruyuki watched both sides and kept his guard up. The Unlimited Neutral Field was inhabited by Enemies, monsters generated and moved by the system. He had only seen a large one once and hadn’t yet fought any. Alone and unable to fly, if an Enemy with the strength of a high-level Burst Linker attacked him, the monster would easily beat him into next week.

Fortunately, however, all he saw were a few cow-and snakelike things moving sluggishly around a distant wilderness, and without getting in their sights, Haruyuki managed to reach the area of the nearby Daita Bridge, on the border between Suginami and Shibuya.

Just in case, he hid in the shadow of a stone a ways off and felt out the scene, but it didn’t look like there was a large number of people lying in wait. That said, the instant he peered at the point where wide valley crossed regular valley, all the strength drained from his body. Leaping into his field of view was the rider in the flashy skull helmet, arms crossed, reclining on his American motorcycle, which was stopped right in the middle of everything.

“Laaaaaaaaaate! You’re late, man!!” Ash Roller shouted, waving his right hand as he watched Haruyuki approach.

“I-I’m sorry. I had to run here, so—”

“And you prob’ly snuck over here, all spooked by the Enemies. Don’t worry. The only ones who show up on a main road like this are the super big guys.”

“Y-you should’ve told me that before! And what are we supposed to do if a super big one shows up?”

“Run away crying, obviously.”

Haruyuki sighed beneath his silver mask, shook his head quickly, and changed the subject. “So why did you call me out here, then? Did you want to finish the duel or something?”

“You stupid? Even if I did beat you and get the ten points, diving here takes ten points. Never get nowhere like that.”

Haruyuki stopped himself from pointing out that that was a double negative and contented himself with spreading his hands questioningly. “Then why?”

“Just get on,” came the cool reply, and his jaw dropped to the ground.

“…Huh?”

“I said, get on, man. Grab a lid— Oh, guess you don’t need one.” Laughing, he put his thumb up behind his back, so Haruyuki, apparently an idiot for being on guard for a trap, straddled the seat in an unaccustomed motion.

“All right. Hold on tight. My pretty baby here accelerates like a monster!!”

Around the “like,” he was already opening up the throttle, front wheel bouncing up high, and Haruyuki came very close to falling off the back. He hurriedly propped his body up with both hands, and the night-black bike tore out due east on Inogashira Street toward the city center, howling throatily.

“Unh…whoa!” he shouted, unable to stand the pressure of the wind hitting his face and the acceleration that made his whole body creak.

The roar of the engine grew louder, and every time he thought they were at top speed, a boot would kick hard at the pedal, and the higher gear would pull them ever faster. The reddish-brown road surface melted into countless flow lines, and the rocks approaching from the front screamed past, one after another.

“Isn’t…this…too fast…!” He half yelped this complaint, but the answer that came back to him was laid-back to the extreme.

“What? Idiot. This isn’t even half of what you do flying up there.”

“B-but the bike is—”

Haruyuki had never even been on an electric scooter in the real world. Naturally, when it came to automobiles, he had ridden in the car his parents had before the divorce and in taxis, but electric cars didn’t make any engine noise, and you obviously didn’t feel the wind.

But this old-style motorbike was a polygon object in a virtual world, a totally different beast than modern machines prioritizing energy efficiency and safety. It was completely incredible that things like this had run wild on public roads in the real world until a mere twenty years ago. Except for a helmet, the rider’s body was completely exposed, and the rider just sat there with no seat belt or air bags or anything.

“H-how fast can this thing go?!” Haruyuki shouted, since he was unable to see the gauge from his position, and once again, the response was unhurried.

“It’s no racer, so it can only do like two hundred.”

“T-two hund…”

If there was an accident, we’d be sooooooooo dead! Haruyuki freaked out in his head, before suddenly, sharply getting it.

That was the kind of vehicle it was. This machine wasn’t for anything other than speed. The engine racing, unsparing in its explosive use of precious fossil fuels; the complex transmission; the desperately fat tires; all of it was designed and assembled for the sole purpose of going fast. The beast existed, as it were, as an unqualified manifestation of the desire for speed. A machine created by human beings without wings, creatures who sought only to go a little faster, faster, faster, as if fighting against their fate of living glued to the earth.

Haruyuki forgot his fear and tossed his head back to look up at the pale yellow sky with wide-open eyes. There, the silhouettes of pterosaur-like Enemies soared together in a small herd.

I—I didn’t understand anything about the meaning of the power that was the wings I was given. A tool to fight, an advantage to win, that’s how I always thought of them. But those silver wings aren’t some special attack I got through leveling up, and they’re not some Enhanced Armament I bought with my points. They’re supposed to be the true nature of the avatar Silver Crow, an avatar my own heart created. They’re supposed to be my salvation, my desire, my hope. It’s because I forgot that…Because I only saw them as a tool…I know it’s because of that, that he could take them from me so easily. And now…Right now I’d—

Realize how precious they are.

Haruyuki desperately swallowed the howl in his throat before Ash Roller noticed anything was up. He was no longer afraid of two hundred kilometers an hour. On the contrary, he even felt like the engine roaring diligently below him was a very industrious and reliable thing.

The bike went around to the south from Inogashira Street, avoiding the heart of the city, and then headed east once again. Around the time they entered Minato Ward, Haruyuki finally asked the question he should have asked right at the start.

“Um…exactly where are we going?”

“Can see it now. That.”

Letting his eyes follow the abrupt jerk of Ash’s helmet, Haruyuki saw a stretch of huge, rough rocks and a hazy, long, and thin silhouette at their end. Probably a steep, rocky mountain—no: it was already a tower, drawing a perfectly perpendicular line up from the ground to reach into the distant sky.

Haruyuki took a few seconds to go over his mental map of southern Tokyo, wondering if there was a building like that in the place corresponding to that spot in the real world, and finally arrived at the answer.

“Huh? I-is that the old Tokyo Tower…?”

“Very yes!”

Ignoring the very dubiousness of the English that Ash Roller fired back, Haruyuki picked through his hazy knowledge of the landmark.

Tokyo Tower, in Minato Ward’s Shiba Park, used to send out TV signals throughout the capital city area but had ceded that role to Tokyo Skytree in Oshiage, Sumida Ward, more than thirty years earlier. After that, it had continued operation for a long time as a viewing platform, but skyscrapers easily surpassing the tower’s 333 meters were built in rapid succession all over Tokyo, so its role as a tourist spot also finally ended at the beginning of 2030. At present, the elevator no longer ran, and the building was preserved as a historical relic into which entry was prohibited.

The former Tokyo Tower—the spire he stared at as they drew nearer with every passing second—existed as bare rock in the Unlimited Neutral Field, seemingly with no internal structure. There was nothing other than the three-hundred-meter stone pillar soaring above the wasteland.

“Wh-what is there in a place like that?” he asked, stunned, and Ash Roller, uncharacteristically, started mumbling vaguely.

“Yeah, well, it’s…Right. There’s a person I want you to meet.”

“A person…?”

Not a guy or a jerk or an SOB?

“Yeah. Uh, to be honest, it’s my parent.”

“P-pardon?!” Haruyuki shouted, shocked to his core. “Y-your parent…?! Then that means…He’s even more incredible than you? Like beard, sunglasses, leather vest, tattooed, beer belly—”

“Just what do you think I am anyway?” he growled, sending a shiver up Haruyuki’s back for some reason. “Just so you know, if you face ’er and run off at the mouth like that, you’re gonna seriously regret it. Been a while since she stepped back from the duel frontline, so you prob’ly don’t know, buuut…Way back in the day, she used to freak people out. People called her ‘Iron Arms,’ ‘ICBM,’ stuff like thaaat.”

“Oh, ICBM…?” Haruyuki parroted back Ash Roller’s words, the ends of which were getting weird, perhaps out of fear.

“Totallyyy. Oh, and one more…Had the nickname ‘Icarus.’”

“Th-that doesn’t sound so scary as all that.”

“Well, you know. Started calling her that after she retired, I guess. She’s, well…Until you showed up, she was the Burst Linker who got closest to the sky in the accelerated world.”

Haruyuki gasped sharply, and at basically the same time, the motorcycle stopped in a cloud of dust.

In front of them, the stone pillar rose up maybe twenty meters in diameter from the rufous, dried earth, so perpendicular it could have been used as a triangle ruler. Nearly a perfect circular cylinder, there was, as expected, nothing like stairs or an entrance anywhere. Maybe because the old Tokyo Tower was off limits in the real world, it was reproduced in a form like this.

Haruyuki looked at their surroundings and wondered just where this “ICBM,” aka Icarus, was, but the only thing that stopped his eyes was a stone turtle-like silhouette, moving slowly in the distance.

It can’t be, he thought, but he asked anyway. “Ummm…so is that her?”

“Idiot. That’s an Enemy. I’m just waiting for the wind to stop.”

“W-wind?” He hadn’t noticed while the motorbike was racing along, but now that Ash mentioned it, there was indeed a strong wind gusting, a result of the Wasteland stage terrain. But it wasn’t as though they were in the middle of a duel, so why would he—

The instant this thought entered his head, the howling of the ceaseless wind stopped abruptly.

“All right! Let’s go! Hold me tight!”

Initially baffled by Ash Roller’s sudden shouting, Haruyuki soon grasped the meaning of his instruction.

The front wheel of the bike, throttle wide open, jumped up, and Haruyuki reflexively wrapped his arms around the avatar’s torso. While the engine emitted a high-pitched whine and the rear wheel kicked up gravel, the front wheel slammed up against the vertical stone wall, and Haruyuki barely had time to wonder at what was happening.

The massive American motorcycle, with pair onboard, started to climb straight up the towering precipice.

“Whoa…whooooaaaa?!” Screaming absurdly, endlessly in his heart, Haruyuki had a vivid premonition of the bike flipping over and falling back, upside down.

However, the bike rode up the vertical pillar without even wobbling, almost as if some mysterious gravity were at work to keep the tires glued to the wall. After five seconds or so, he finally understood and allowed himself to relax.

This was Ash Roller’s wall-climbing ability. Now that he thought about it, he had seen this bike run freely along a building’s walls more than a few times during duels. But he hadn’t known it could climb for long periods like this, with no approach run. Put another way, Ash Roller was right now casually revealing the upper limits of his own abilities to Haruyuki, a member of an enemy Legion. But unable to ferret out Ash’s true intentions, Haruyuki simply held his breath and stared at the peak of the spire.

Obviously, the bike couldn’t manage the same speed as it had on the ground, but it still climbed forcefully in a low gear. Glancing down, Haruyuki saw that the earth was already so dim in the distance that it looked like it was a different color.

Flying with his wings, this height would have likely been no big deal, but now, his stomach tightened sharply and he hastily brought his eyes back to face forward. The top of the spire finally coming into view seemed to have been cut flat, and the edge traced a beautiful arc in the yellow sky.

When they were about ten seconds or so away from arriving at that arc, he felt a wall of air about to rush at them from the left.

“Shit! Wind! Shiiiiit!” Cursing, Ash Roller turned the handlebars and shifted the motorcycle’s trajectory to the left. The squall that blew in seconds later sideswiped the bike mercilessly.

“Fly hiiiiigh!!”

“Aaaaaaaaaah!!”

On top of the bike shooting up vertically, riding the wind, Haruyuki and Ash Roller paddled the air, a crawl stroke in the sky. Perhaps because of their efforts, they made it to the peak in a parabola, steadily sliding to the side as they came down. Then, the rear tire of the falling bike landed solidly, about five centimeters from the edge of the top of the tower.

“I-I-I-I-I am never riding this thing again! I’m never getting on anything that doesn’t have at least four tires again!!” Haruyuki moaned, tumbling from the seat and pressing hands and feet against hard stone.

Ash Roller, however, still straddled the motorcycle, waving the index finger of his right hand in annoyance. “You don’t get it at all. It’s fun because the bike could fall over, man.”

“That back there wasn’t about falling over!!” Haruyuki shouted, shoulders heaving, and shook his head before finally taking a look around.

The summit of the stone pillar/old Tokyo Tower in the real world was a circular space with the exact same twenty-meter diameter as the bottom. But it looked completely different from the world below.

The words heavenly garden popped up in the back of his mind. A soft lawn shone greenly over the entire area, a small spring in the center. The shimmering water there was clearer than anything he had ever seen.

In the center of the spring drifted a small floating island—and on top of this, Haruyuki saw something unexpected.

An elliptical blue light turning slowly, shimmering like a mirage. A portal. The sole means of returning to the real world of your own volition from this Unlimited Neutral Field.

He was surprised there would be one in a place like this; the majority of portals were located in landmark-type buildings like large train stations and tourist attractions. In which case, maybe it wasn’t so strange for there to be one in the old Tokyo Tower. But it seemed like only people who could scale vertical walls like Ash Roller, or people who could fly like Silver Crow used to, could use one way up here.

He brought his gaze back, cocking his head to one side, and saw another unexpected something on the opposite side of the garden.

A house.

The adorable toy-size house was surrounded by countless flowering plants and stood quite quietly. The walls were painted pure white, and the pointed roof was a deep green. It matched the green of the ivy crawling up the walls, and the sight was so beautiful it could have been mistaken for a page from a picture book.

As he stared attentively, no words escaping him, the door of the house abruptly opened with a light creak. Next to him, Ash Roller leapt off his bike and stood at attention.

So then the person coming out was likely Ash Roller’s “parent.” Probably a macho Hells Angels type in leather pants. The house was a bit of a mismatch, but Haruyuki wouldn’t be surprised if an enormous Harley came growling out that door. He braced himself for anything.

But, in the end, he couldn’t begin to prepare himself for the situation he found himself in.

What came rolling out, creaking as it did, was indeed a two-wheeled vehicle. But rather than front to back, the wheels were side by side. The spokes were extremely thin silver lines, and the tires were also silver, perhaps a centimeter wide, rather than rubber. On this vehicle was a slender chair, also knitted from silver wire.

A wheelchair. The total opposite of an American bike, with no engine, no muffler. And the person sitting there was about ten thousand light years away from the image in Haruyuki’s mind.

There was no doubt that it was a duel avatar. The arms resting in her lap were tinged with a smooth, hard blue brilliance, and the lower jaw of the downward-pointing face was in the shape of a sharp mask. He couldn’t see any more of the face because of the wide-brimmed hat the avatar was wearing. Not the witchlike pointy hat of Chiyuri’s avatar, Lime Bell, but a pure white bonnet. The body was also wrapped in a dress the same white.

…Huh? So it is a girl?

As if to give an affirmative answer to Haruyuki’s surprise, the stirring wind caused the long hair beneath the hat to flap. The straight, waist-length hair was a sky blue so clear it could suck you in—the color of a clear fall sky.

The wheels creaked once again, and the wheelchair started to advance slowly. And yet both of the avatar’s hands stayed as they were folded up on her lap. Apparently, the wheelchair was equipped with some kind of self-propelling mechanism.

The wheelchair rode smoothly forward, approaching them via the same brick path that circled the spring in the center of the lawn. The avatar stopped about two meters away from Haruyuki and Ash Roller and lifted her hat gently, revealing her face. Haruyuki stood stock-still and stared at the visage, unable to believe he was looking upon the parent to Century End rider Ash Roller.

Her face was the kind often seen on female-type duel avatars, a mask fitted with nothing more than lens-type eyes. But Haruyuki felt like this face, without nose or mouth, was more beautiful than similar avatars he had seen so far. The avatar looked straight at Haruyuki and then Ash Roller, date-shaped eyes glittering a pale red against glowing, pale blue skin.

“It’s been a while, Ash. I’m happy to see you haven’t forgotten me yet.”

“I-it has been a while, Master. A-a-as if I could forget you.”

Unfortunately, Haruyuki did not get the chance to retort, Shouldn’t that be “mega” ages, to Ash Roller while he bowed respectfully. The sky-blue avatar turned her intense gaze back to Haruyuki.

“So you’re Silver Crow.”

The calm voice was like a gentle breeze, and Haruyuki also felt keenly compelled to lower his head deeply for some reason. “Y-yes. Nice to meet you. I’m Silver Crow.”

“A pleasure. My name is Sky Raker. Glad to meet you, too, Corvus.”

Feeling her gaze flicker up to his shoulders, Haruyuki shrank into himself abruptly. From the tone of her voice, she seemed to know about Silver Crow, but the silver wings—the ability to fly—that this name was so known for in the accelerated world were no longer upon his back.

Avoiding Sky Raker’s gentle gaze that somehow seemed to penetrate into his mind, Haruyuki cast his eyes down to the ground. But after a short silence, he threw his head back up, forgetting his shyness, when he heard Ash Roller.

“Um…okay then, Master. I—I’ll be on my way now.”

“Wh-what?!” Haruyuki pressed the skull-helmeted rider turning to return to his bike. “Y-you’re leaving?! Wh-wh-what am I supposed to do?!”

“How should I know?”

“How should you know? You’re the one who brought me here!!”

“’Cause you were all wah wah, boohoo, whine whine. Total mess, I shouldn’t have even bothered to get out my missiles. And after I worked so hard to get them…,” Ash Roller grumbled, scuffing the bottoms of his boots against the stone paving as if he were trying to get off dirt that wasn’t there, but then changed his tone abruptly and said, “Look, Crow. I don’t know how you lost your wings, but right now, you’re prob’ly thinking, ‘Can’t fly, can’t win, no point in fighting.’ But, man…you know how many Burst Linkers there are in the accelerated world who can’t fly no matter how badly they want to? You ever thought about that?”

Taking a shallow breath, Haruyuki reflexively dropped his eyes to his feet. However, Ash Roller’s cutting words continued. “I mean, you duel long enough and you see all kinds of shit, man. Including people losing their power. But, y’know, your wings aren’t the sort of thing where you can just, like, give up on the sneak attacks or something for having lost ’um. You keep fighting half-assedly like this and just disappear, all those guys who looked up, all this time, to watch you flying up there…All of us…” Ash Roller kicked fiercely at the ground, almost as if he couldn’t get the rest out.

Head still hanging, Haruyuki murmured quietly in his heart, I don’t want to give up, you know. But my wings…After my flight ability has been deleted from the system, what is there I can do?

“It’s true my attitude in that duel wasn’t great,” he somehow managed to choke out, slowly raising a leaden head. “But…what does that have to do with this?”

“Uh, oh…That’s the thing…I mean—”

“Corvus.” He heard the quiet voice of Sky Raker, Ash Roller’s parent, silent up until that point. “Ash was merely thinking that perhaps I could assist you in getting your wings back.”

“Huh?” Haruyuki’s eyes opened wide, as did his mouth. “M-my wings…? Assist…But Ash, you’re Green Legion—”

“Oh! Right! Sorry!!” Ash Roller cried, throwing himself into the motorcycle seat with a thump. “Listen! Don’t get the wrong idea!! Now you owe me! This is serious strategy here! A secret operation to raise your popularity parameters and get you to betray the Black Legion, jerk! Yeah! I am mega coooooooool!!”

“That’s vulgar, Ash.” Sky Raker’s quiet voice snapped at the skull rider, who was waving the raised middle finger of his right hand.

“Yes! I’m sorry, Master! Th-th-then I’ll just be getting on excusing myself, yes!” He revved the engine loudly, and the American motorcycle plunged toward the spring in the center of the lawn, jumped high at the water’s edge, and leapt into the glittering blue portal—

And disappeared.

More stunned than he had ever been, Haruyuki stood stock-still and somehow managed to mutter, “A secret operation’s…pointless…”

Sky Raker giggled. “Other than the way his brain works, the way he talks, and the way he looks, he’s a pretty decent kid.”

What is there other than that? Haruyuki reflexively wondered for a few seconds, and then pushed Ash Roller out of his mind and took a few steps toward the silver wheelchair stopped near the spring.

A veritable mountain of questions swirled around in his heart as he timidly opened his mouth, still stuck on which one to ask first. “Uh…um…Ash said this, but. He said you were the person in the accelerated world who’d come closest to the sky…”

At this, Sky Raker’s smile became transparent somehow, and she nodded. “I suppose I would be the representative of those Burst Linkers who can never fly no matter how much they want to, who Ash was talking about. No, I guess I shouldn’t say that I couldn’t fly. It’s just that, in the end, these hands didn’t reach the sky.”

Haruyuki unthinkingly winced at this response, which he had anticipated to a certain degree. In that case, she actually should be telling me off instead of trying to help me, he reflected, but he couldn’t stop himself from jumping at the single thread of hope glimmering faintly before him.

Blinking, he raised his gaze and uttered his next question in a hoarse voice. “Then…is it true…? That you can get my wings back…?”

This time, the answer didn’t come right away. The avatar gently brushed aside dazzlingly lustrous sky-blue hair and stared at Haruyuki for a while.

“That’s impossible,” she said crisply.

“What…”

“When you lose something from your duel avatar, there is a reason you had to lose it. Here in this place, I have no means of negating that reason.”

“……”

His faint hope instantly cut down, Haruyuki started to hang his head, crestfallen. But just as he was about to tear his gaze away, Sky Raker casually lifted the hem of the white dress she wore, and his eyes popped open.

“Please take a look.”

What he saw—or rather didn’t see—was from the avatar’s knees down. The round knee joints drew a supple line up to the thin thigh area, but the calves that should have stretched out below them were nonexistent on both legs.

Perhaps he should have considered the idea that there was something wrong with her legs when the avatar came out in a wheelchair. But what would cause the legs of a duel avatar to disappear?

It was true that during duels, you could take damage through the loss of limbs for whatever reason. Haruyuki himself had lost arms and legs in fierce battles a countless number of times. But once the duel was over, the loss was immediately canceled, and you were back to brand-new in the next battlefield.

Haruyuki held his breath and, unable to avert his eyes, was forced to wonder, Maybe Sky Raker, too…?

Maybe she had her legs taken from her forever by Nomi, aka Dusk Taker, or another Burst Linker with the same ability?

But the next words from her mouth refuted that idea.

“I chose to cut them off myself.”

“What…?!”

“I decided that I no longer needed legs, and I had a certain person cut them off for me. Understanding the whole time that it was the height of arrogance, egotism—no, madness. Since then, no matter how many times I dive into the accelerated world, my legs have never returned. Which means…even now inside me, the embers of madness smolder. As long as they do, my legs will remain like this.”

Sky Raker stared closely at Haruyuki, rooted to the spot, with eyes the color of dawn, and pronounced softly, “Your wings are the same. If you do not face the reason that led to their loss and overcome it, you will most certainly never get them back.”

Reason.

In other words, Nomi/Dusk Taker’s special attack, Demonic Commandeer.

No, that wasn’t it. It was the defeat itself. Unless Haruyuki got past the pain of defeat etched so deeply into his heart at being forced to yield to Seiji Nomi in every way, he would never be able to get back his wings. That’s what it was.

But overcoming that was absolutely impossible. Because Haruyuki had lost his lone ability, the power of flight, and Nomi, who had taken it, possessed at that very minute its capacity to fly freely. Haruyuki didn’t have a hope of beating him.

He dropped to his knees on the lawn unconsciously, and Sky Raker threw him an unexpected line.

“No matter what we do in this garden, your wings won’t come back. But I didn’t say you wouldn’t be able to fly, Corvus.”

Let’s sit down before we talk about the rest.

The self-driving wheelchair started to move with a squeal, so Haruyuki followed, seriously confused.

White benches were installed at the edges of the round garden in the sky, each at a cardinal direction. They were the type with no backrest, only a seat, so that you could sit facing either way. Sky Raker brought her wheelchair to a stop next to the northern bench, facing outward, and Haruyuki shyly sat next to her. When he lifted his face, he gasped at the spectacular sight before him: an unbroken view of the heart of Wasteland Tokyo, three hundred meters below.

The government district area in Nagata-cho had changed into immense ruins hewn from red sandstone. The Shuto Expressway curved across the chasm, supported by an arch of piled stones. Even farther off stood a vivid red castle, remarkably majestic in appearance: the Imperial Palace in the real world. No matter what the stage was, that always existed as an enormous castle, sometimes beautiful, sometimes brimming with an unearthly aura.

As Haruyuki idly wondered if anyone lived there, Sky Raker broke the silence.

“I had thought I might like to meet you, Silver Crow.”

“Huh…oh, th-thanks,” he stammered, pulling in his shoulders.

Watching him, the sky-blue avatar radiated a lingering, gentle smile before continuing softly. “Seven years have passed since the foundation of the accelerated world, and finally a flying ability appears. When Ash told me about you, I was deeply surprised and also greatly interested. I thought, what kind of spirit…what kind of wounded psyche’s scars could realize a power so great as to cut free of the tremendous gravity of this world?”

“No, it’s— I-I’m sorry. My scars are really nothing big at all.” Making his body even smaller, Haruyuki shook his head in short bursts. “In the real, I’m just fat and bullied and wishy-washy…Lately, I’ve been thinking it’s kind of presumptuous to call that kind of thing a mental scar.”

Even bewildered as he was at himself for telling this to a Burst Linker he had just met—a Burst Linker who was closer to being an enemy than a friend—the words tumbled smoothly and mysteriously from his lips.

Sky Raker smiled again and shook her head gently.

“The mental scars that Brain Burst reads from the owner’s unconsciousness and uses as a resource for the duel avatar do not necessarily indicate only the strength of anger or resentment.”

“Huh…? B-but, I mean, scars, that’s like feelings of failure, right?”

“True, but those are not everything. Duel avatars generated from an enormous loss—say, a seething anger—without exception, manifest this power as a simple destructive force. Like with that Chrome Disaster, which brought such monumental calamity to the accelerated world.”

Hearing that name, Haruyuki took a sharp breath. It had only been a few months prior that he had been trembling right down to the marrow of his bones in the presence of the Armor of Catastrophe, Chrome Disaster, and its terrifying attack power. It was an Enhanced Armament, but it definitely seemed to be stained with thoughts of extreme anger.

“And avatars with malice as their source acquire midrange fighting abilities like a curse, while avatars created from despair often become self-destructive types, hurting themselves to defeat their enemies. But you do know that not all avatars house destructive powers like this?”

“…Yes.” Now that she was saying it, that was exactly it. Haruyuki’s wings were not a direct attack power, and Ash Roller’s bike was the same. However, in that case, what exactly was this “wounded psyche—”

“The wound, in other words, is a lack,” Sky Raker replied, almost as if reading Haruyuki’s mind. “A hole in the heart where something important is missing. You have this futile hole, and you get angry, you resent it, you despair—or you reach out your hand for the heavens again. That choice determines the nature of your avatar.”

“Reach…your hand?”

“Exactly. In other words, hope. A wounded psyche is also the flip side of hope,” Sky Raker said crisply, and then raised her face to stare directly into Haruyuki’s eyes from under her white hat. “Silver Crow. You must have had more hope for the sky in your heart than any other Burst Linker who came before you. The strength of your desire to aim for the sky gave birth to the flying ability, to wings. Do you see? It isn’t that because you had wings, you could fly. Just the opposite. Because you could fly, you gave concrete form to your wings.”

“Because…I could fly…,” Haruyuki murmured hoarsely, and after repeating this several times in his heart to try and understand what it meant, he twisted up his face under his silver mask and shook his head vehemently. “That’s—that’s ridiculous. If you could fly just through the force of your will…Are you saying that those wings were just for show?”

“Taking it to the extreme, that’s exactly it. Due to some kind of phenomenon, your wings and your flying ability in the system have been taken from you in the form of a removed object. But that doesn’t mean that the force of will that is the source of that ability has been. Because, no matter what the special ability or avatar, taking that is impossible.”

“No way…What you’re saying, it’s not possible!” Haruyuki threw his head down and clutched both knees tightly. “Even if I did have this desire to fly in my heart, it would just be…a trigger. Brain Burst read it, and then made those wings and their flying ability for me. So in this world, the ability itself is reality! U-unless I get it back, I’ll never…” Haruyuki nearly howled, tightening his grip on his knees so much that his fingers were almost creaking.

For a while, only the wind sounded, blowing past at three hundred meters above the ground. Stretching toward the sky from the edge of the garden, the flowers in front of him—the names of which he did not know—rippled and scattered petals soundlessly.

“In other words, what you’re saying is this.” Sky Raker’s voice rode to him on the wind, unchanged. She was still quiet after Haruyuki’s anguished outburst, but her voice was tinged with a faint echo of humor. “That in this accelerated world, the force of your will and such are meaningless. That the numerical data prescribed and calculated by the system alone determine any and all phenomena.”

“…But I mean, it is. We’re in the middle of a VR game. You’re saying there’s something other than digital data.”

“This wheelchair.”

Her sudden, seemingly unconnected statement made Haruyuki yank his face up.

“Look at it closely. This is not a separate Enhanced Armament. It’s just an object, just as it looks, assembled from a chair and wheels. I’m sure, however, you saw earlier that it drives itself?”

“Y-yes,” Haruyuki replied, bewildered all the while, not seeing the true meaning of the question. “It’s equipped with some kind of propulsive device, isn’t it? A motor or something somewhere.”

There’s obviously something. I mean, it drove all by itself. She probably has a small controller in her hand, he thought, craning his neck to run his eyes over the slender silver wheels. His eyes flew open as the enormous shock of realization hit him.

There was nothing. He couldn’t see any motor-type parts at all, not on the thin axle, not on the hubs, not on the rims. So then maybe some kind of injection-type device? He peered around at the back, but there was no nozzle or anything similar anywhere.

“B-but, I mean. Before, it moved by itself,” Haruyuki muttered in blank amazement, and Sky Raker gently spread her thin hands out to the sides. Neither contained a trace of anything controller-like.

The wheelchair on which she sat perfectly still slowly rolled backward, wheels creaking.

“…N-no way.”

Creak, creak. The chair pulled even farther back and suddenly began twirling on the lawn, before gracefully sliding back and forth and side to side, almost like a figure skater on ice. Finishing its brief dance, the chair stopped neatly, in exactly the same position as before.

“How was that?”

“How was that…?” Haruyuki’s shoulders shook and his eyes were as far open as they could get.

It shouldn’t move. This world created by the Brain Burst program was so faithful to authenticity that it could even be said to be another reality. All machines required a motive device, and all motive devices required an energy source. For instance, Ash Roller’s bike had gasoline in the tank, and the drive wheel spun because of a chain connected to the engine. Which was exactly why, when Haruyuki lifted the rear wheel during their duel, the bike had no longer been able to move. In some other game, the bike almost certainly would have dashed ahead with just the front wheel, with no regard for how drive systems work. So this wheelchair propelling itself without any driving noise or injection light whatsoever—

“It can’t be…There’s no way. What…Exactly what force is moving that chair?” Haruyuki asked, gasping.

A serene smile graced the small mask of the duel avatar whose hair was the color of the sky. “My will,” she replied.

“Huh…?!”

“I moved it with nothing more than the power of my will.”

“B-but-but-but!” Haruyuki shouted, stammering like a corrupt sound file, so floored by this that his heart nearly leapt from his mouth. “Th-that’s almost. Almost…like ESP, isn’t it?! S-so then, that’s the ability ‘Psychokinesis’…or…?”

Here, the smile turned bitter, and Sky Raker shook her head loosely. “Ha-ha-ha, it isn’t that. This world…whether it’s the normal duel field or the Unlimited Neutral Field, every Burst Linker fighting in the accelerated world has this power.”

“Wh-what?!”

“Please think about it. You were able to fly freely in the sky when you had wings. Isn’t that so?”

“Y-yes…”

“But how exactly did you control those wings? After all, the real you does not have wings.”

He blinked successively at the question, one he had never considered before. “Th-that was…” Haruyuki responded hesitantly, unconsciously moving his shoulders. “A movement in my shoulder blades…”

“If you were doing that, you wouldn’t be able to fully swing your fist while flying. Please try to remember. Even if you weren’t aware of it, you were controlling your flight with the power of your will. Am I wrong?”

“……”

Even at a total loss for words, he still was struck with a thought: Now that you mention it…It was true that as Silver Crow, he moved both hands like crazy and could just take off on the spot, without running into the takeoff. And now that someone was asking what kind of physical movements he made when he did, the answer was—none.

But he still had trouble swallowing Sky Raker’s explanation. “The power…of my will,” he began, shaking his head sharply. “But, I mean, that’s, how would it read that? The Neurolinker doesn’t have a function like that…It’s not supposed to—”

And then Kuroyukihime’s voice from long ago reverberated in his ears: Neurolinkers also have the ability to access things other than the sensory or movement regions of our brains.

But she had been talking about mental scars, like discussed earlier. In which case, he could wrap his brain around it—because scars equaled memories plus interpretation. But how could this vague “power of will” or whatever be digitized?

“Perhaps you’d understand if, instead of ‘will,’ I said ‘image power’?”

At Sky Raker’s voice, Haruyuki gasped and lifted his head.

“Image…?”

“Exactly. You could also call it ‘the power of imagination.’ During flight, you create a strong image of how much you’re going to accelerate, when you’ll turn, when you’ll decelerate. Your Neurolinker reads that and moves your avatar. Do you see? Image power! It is precisely this that is the true power hidden within us Burst Linkers. I have total control over this wheelchair through a stable imagining of the two wheels rotating. Admittedly, it did take me quite a long time before I was able to do this, but it’s not impossible. Absolutely not.”

Once again, the right wheel turned with a slight creak, and Sky Raker and her wheelchair faced Haruyuki again. When she spoke, she sounded majestic and mysterious somehow—an oracular echo.

“Those Burst Linkers who manage to attain control via the Image Power System—which lies beneath the Movement Command System normally used to control the avatar—have a name for it. This desire straight from the heart—in other words, your will.”

She paused for a beat.

“Incarnate System.”

“In…carnate?” It wasn’t a word he had heard in either the accelerated or real worlds. But Haruyuki could feel a kind of definite power in the sound of it, and he repeated it several times in his head.

He didn’t immediately understand what Sky Raker was saying. The Neurolinker might differ in its very foundation from the old-generation VR machines, and Brain Burst might be a mysterious super-application, but how on earth could they digitize the imagination of the diver?

And yet the delicate silver wheelchair had, in fact, danced easily for him on the lawn, without any kind of propulsive device at all.

Accept it. Haruyuki squeezed his eyes shut and murmured to himself. It was circular, but if the will—if believing had real power in this world, he felt it would certainly become the truth for him if he just believed Sky Raker.

“So then…So then.” Something large and hot choked his throat, and Haruyuki worked to put the rest of his thoughts into words. “If I learn to use this Incarnate System, I’ll be able to fly again even without wings…I-is that what that means?”

Haruyuki stared at Sky Raker’s face as if devouring it and waited for her reply with a longing that almost burned.

The words she uttered quietly a few seconds later, however, were neither an affirmation nor a denial. “I showed you before how I move the wheels with the power of my will. But I could easily do the same thing with my hands, instead of working so hard to focus the image. Do you see? Using the will as an agent for work is possible to do with the normal control system, but manifesting something with the will phenomena is normally impossible; there is a very wide, deep ditch—no, a vast canyon—between these two concepts. To speak figuratively, it’s like hitting a bullet with a bullet in the real world. It’s possible, in terms of physics, but the execution is difficult. Extremely.”

Sky Raker took her eyes off the speechless Haruyuki and cast her gentle eyes up at the sky. Then she began to speak again, still tranquil but sounding like she was having a hard time suppressing the would-be tremor in her voice.

“I wasn’t able to do it. I threw away my legs, my friends; I abandoned everything I could think of, and yet I wasn’t able to detach myself from the virtual gravity of this world…I said so earlier, didn’t I? That the Burst Linker who can’t fly no matter how she might want to is me.”

“Uh…uh-huh…”

When he agreed, spellbound, the sky-blue avatar waved her supple right hand up at the heavens and continued. “Drawing near but never quite there…Since the beginning, this avatar of mine has had a certain Enhanced Armament. The power to move away from the earth and approach the sky. However, you most certainly could not call it flying. I leapt to an altitude of a mere hundred meters or so through a momentary thrust force, before I simply fell back down.”

“……” Unable to reply, Haruyuki merely held his breath.

Once, a long time ago, he had tested just how high he could go with Silver Crow’s power of flight. The normal duel field was surrounded on all sides by semitransparent barriers marking the boundaries of the area, but he had wondered about the sky.

In the end, Haruyuki’s fingers had not come into contact with any wall before his fully charged special-attack gauge was completely spent. He remembered his altitude at that time as being three times higher than the Shinjuku government building he could see off in the distance. The government building, which had been rebuilt in recent years, boasted an imposing five hundred meters. In short, Haruyuki had effortlessly risen to a height of fifteen hundred meters, and that had been purely to satisfy his curiosity.

I didn’t even think about the meaning of the power I was given.

Carried away by the same regret he’d felt on Ash Roller’s bike, Haruyuki pulled into himself as much as he could and turned his ears toward Sky Raker’s voice.

“I ended up possessed by the desire to someday fly higher, go farther. I spent every level-up bonus on enhancing my jumping ability, and all my time fighting so that I could get even more points. The few friends I had, and even my parent, lost patience with what I became and left me. All alone, only the Master of the Legion I belonged to understood and helped me. And I tried to be useful to her as well; we spent many, many hours fighting side by side…But when I reached and turned that bonus again to my jumping, I had a flash of insight: It would never be enough to turn Jump into Fly…My desire had turned into a deep-rooted delusion—no, madness.”

“Mad…ness.”

Sky Raker glanced at Haruyuki as he muttered hoarsely, and the faintest of smiles rose up as she nodded sagely.

“I…I made my avatar itself more lightweight, and in order to enhance my ability to fly using my will, I decided to get rid of my legs, which held my greatest attack abilities. I asked the person who had been both my friend and Master to cut off my legs with her sword. She tried to stop me. But I no longer understood even her feelings…I said some terrible things to her, but she only looked sad until finally she granted my wish.”

Sky Raker stroked her knees lightly with her right hand and brought her story to a calm end.

“I used all my bonuses, trained my will, and even abandoned my legs to make it impossible for me to walk. The maximum altitude I was able to reach as a result was three hundred and fifty meters. Three point five times my starting altitude. But I did not reach the sky. I just barely managed to reach the peak of old Tokyo Tower here, and then I finally understood. That the psychic wounds that were the source of my avatar and my hopes did not have that much power. ‘Raker’ means ‘one who views.’ Viewing the sky for a moment at the peak of a parabola…that is the absolute limit of the power given to me. But by the time I realized this, I had lost everything I cared about.

“So, Silver Crow?” Sky Raker asked, turning her shadow of a mouth up into a smile. “Even after hearing this fool’s story, do you still want to train with the Incarnate System and learn to fly? Even knowing that it’s most likely ninety-nine percent impossible?”

“……” Haruyuki hung his head and bit down on his lip.

I won’t be able to do it. Why should a total gutless loser, crybaby wimp like me be able to do something even she couldn’t do, when she’s a powerful enough Burst Linker to get to level eight?

It’s not like I’ll be like this forever and never get my wings back. If I can just hold on for two years, he’ll give them back to me. I can make something up about why I don’t have my wings for Takumu and Kuroyukihime. I just have to lie and keep paying points in secret to Nomi for two years. I mean, back when Araya was bullying me, I did basically the same thing and I got through six months of that, didn’t I? And Chiyuri, if I really beg her, she should be able to put up with being treated like a pet on the duel field. It’ll be fine. If I just pull back into myself and keep my head down, it’ll be fine.

“…I—”

I can’t, Haruyuki tried to reply.

Answer, stand up, turn around, take the portal back to the real world.

“…I…”

But something in his chest resisted stubbornly, and he couldn’t make himself say the rest. Almost as if the avatar Silver Crow itself were refusing to utter the words. Almost as if this avatar—which was now, having lost its wings, nothing more than a stick figure, a huge head sitting on wirelike limbs—were insisting to Haruyuki that it still had value.

He took a deep breath, filling his trembling chest with cold air, and held it.

“There’s still something I have left to do…,” Haruyuki said, bowing his head deeply. “Please. I want you to teach me…how to use the Incarnate System.”

Sky Raker smiled again faintly and cocked her head slightly. “It will take a long—a very long time.”

“I don’t care.”

“It will probably take much longer than you think. So long that, depending on how it goes, you might reach the Point of No Return as a Burst Linker.”

Haruyuki immediately understood the meaning of those words.

He knew two kings—the Black King, Black Lotus; and the Red King, Scarlet Rain—and there was something quite remote from their real-world selves in both of them, in their words and actions. The reason was that they had spent a protracted amount of time in this Unlimited Neutral Field, so much so that a gap between their actual and mental ages had emerged.

So the time to make that choice had finally come for him as well. Even as he was terrified, Haruyuki took a deep breath and nodded. “I understand…Please, Sky Raker.”

“All right, then.” Turning the wheelchair with a creak, the accelerated world’s hermit looked up at the sky. “Right now, in real time, it’s after nine PM, isn’t it? How much longer can you stay in the dive in the other side’s time?”

“Um…I have school tomorrow, but I should be okay for another three or four hours. If you like, until morning.”

Kuroyukihime had once warned him that if he spent too long in this world, his real-world memories from before the dive would grow weaker. But that didn’t seem like much of a concern right now. No matter how much time passed, he would never be able to forget that Seiji Nomi had stolen his wings. That, at least, was guaranteed.

“Good.” Sky Raker brought the fingertips of both hands together and turned to face Haruyuki. “Well then…we’ll stop here for today.”

“E-excuse me?!”

“Your heart is in turmoil with all the things that have happened today. You can’t train your will like this. And in any case, it’s night here. We’ll sleep well tonight and then begin tomorrow morning. We have plenty of time.”

“S-sleep well?” Haruyuki asked, baffled. “B-but if we sleep during a full dive, won’t our Neurolinkers look at our brain waves and automatically link out?”

“You don’t need to worry about that happening while accelerated. You know that popular manga artist who’s actually a high school student? The one whose work was recently turned into an anime?”

Perplexed at this question out of the blue, he nodded slightly. “Y-yeah. I’m a big fan…”

“He’s a high-level Burst Linker. He gets all his sleep on this side, so he can do something as absurd as have a weekly serialization while going to high school.”

Whoa, that genius hit maker is actually a Burst Linker. So then this kind of thing’s happened before. A faint sense of déjà vu making his head spin, Haruyuki trailed after the wheelchair’s smooth advance.

The inside of the white-walled, green-roofed house he had been invited into was larger than he had expected. That said, it was still just one room, equipped with nothing more than a small kitchen, a table, and a bed.

Sky Raker brought her wheelchair over to the kitchen’s stove, where she removed the lid off a pot, uncovering a burbling sound. Instantly, a delicious smell filled the room. Before the eyes of a stunned Haruyuki, she nimbly ladled something resembling stew into deep wooden plates, and then brought her wheelchair to the table, a plate in each hand. As she set them down together, complete with spoons made of the same wood, she said to Haruyuki, “No need to stand. Have a seat.”

“Oh…S-sure.” Staggering, he set himself down in a high-backed chair, looked at the steaming white stew before him, and murmured in his heart, No, but, this is, here…

“This is in the middle of a fighting game, right?” he blurted, and Sky Raker nodded with a composed expression on her face.

“Yes, it is. Is there a problem?”

“It’s just, I mean, supper in a fighter…”

“My! In the background of a certain 2-D fighter game in the early years, the Gallery was eating ramen, you know.”

“Th-that might be true, but!”

At the same time that he was struck by the urge to rip off his own head, Haruyuki realized that he was intensely hungry. He had just chomped down on that pizza in the real world not even minutes ago; where exactly was this hunger coming from?

The metaphysical question vanished like the mist when Sky Raker urged him, “Go ahead, please eat,” and Haruyuki quickly grabbed the wooden spoon.

And then he was confounded once again.

“Oh, b-but my…mouth.”

Silver Crow’s face was covered by a mirrorlike silver helmet and had neither eyes nor nose nor mouth. However, since Sky Raker encouraged him with a gesture to eat, he timidly scooped up some stew and brought it to his mouth. When he did—

The lower side of his helmet slid up a small bit with a light humming noise. Taken aback, he touched it with his left hand and felt a definite mouth in there. No longer understanding anything, Haruyuki muttered his thanks for the food and stuck the spoon in there.

It was delicious.

More natural than any VR manufacturer’s taste-reproduction engine, a nuanced flavor permeated his mouth, and Haruyuki spooned up potatoes and onions and chicken and more to stuff his cheeks.

“I’m glad you seem to like it, Corvus,” Sky Raker said with a smile, elegantly moving her own wooden spoon across from him while he greedily devoured his stew. “Please take your time and savor it. So that you’ll have this memory for the time being.”

“…Sorry?”

After emptying his plate without taking time to breathe, Haruyuki finally considered the meaning of her words. But without giving him the chance to ask her anything, Sky Raker agilely dumped the plates together on a shelf, so he could only bow his head and thank her for the delicious meal.

At some point when he wasn’t paying attention, it had gotten completely dark outside the south-facing window. In the distance, he could see a light that was probably in the Odaiba area, rocking back and forth, reflecting off the black surface of the ocean.

Sky Raker snapped her fingers sharply, and whether it was a function of the house or telekinesis through will power, all the curtains slid shut. The wheelchair creaked over to the side of the small bed, and the amputee avatar nimbly shifted her body on top of the sheet, using her right hand as a support point.

“I know it’s a bit early, but perhaps we should be getting to sleep?”

Huh?

Sleep?

One bed. Two avatars. Which means— What does that mean?

The pillow barreling into him cut off the instant expressway of his thoughts. He clutched it and cursed himself—Right, of course, what was I even thinking, you stupid dumbass—as he fell to the floor in his silver avatar. His entire body was covered in clanking metal armor; there was no great difference as to whether it was a bed or floor underneath him.

Having hung her hat on a hook on the wall, yanked off her dress, and laid down on the bed, Sky Raker snapped her fingers once more. The light on the ceiling and the fire in the wood stove vanished, and the inside of the house was shrouded in a light blue darkness.

“Good night, Corvus.”

Just what I’d expect from Ash Roller’s parent; she’s not just a regular someone, Haruyuki thought admiringly and replied, “G-good night…”

At the same time, he cried in his heart, As if I could sleep in this situation!

But surprisingly, the instant he laid down next to the table and closed his eyes, a white fog began to gently envelop the core of his head. It was just like Sky Raker said; he was seriously spent mentally because of all the things that had happened.

Of course, it wasn’t as though he had forgotten the humiliation and despair Nomi had inflicted on him. But right now, in this house in this world at least, he felt he could leave the black things at a distance. Although this perhaps might also have been due to utilitarian and gluttonistic reasons, given that he was pleasantly stuffed with a stomach full of delicious stew.

Haruyuki fought for a while against the sleepiness trying to pull his eyes shut with an almost violent heaviness, and murmured very quietly, “Um, Sky Raker? Can I ask you something?”

“Go ahead,” she replied right away, so he glanced over toward the bed and directed his question at the graceful curve of her silhouette.

“Um…has Ash Roller already learned the Incarnate System?”

“Not completely, not yet. But I’ve just given him hints. It seems he is trying a variety of things in his own way.”

At this reply, something fell into place for him. Haruyuki had felt that Ash’s new technique of standing on the bike while riding it was just too over the top, but it probably had some image control incorporated into it. After he nodded slightly, still on the floor, he gave voice to his next question. “If you’re his parent, then are you also in the Green Legion…?”

The answer to this came after a slight pause. “No. I have only and will only ever belong to one Legion.”

“Then…that’s…?” Raising his head unconsciously, Haruyuki dared to utter the question he really wanted to ask. “That Legion…It wouldn’t happen to be Nega Nebulous? And the person you asked to cut off your legs—”

“Black Lotus. Stronger, nobler, and kinder than anyone, my only friend.”

Haruyuki dipped his head at her voice, so still and yet echoing beautifully like a song.

“That’s exactly…what I thought. You’re somehow like—”

“It was a long time ago.” Curt words from the bed reached him in the dark, as if to cut him off. “A long, long time ago. Now go to sleep, Corvus. Tomorrow’s going to be an early day.” He heard the sound of her rolling over sharply, as if to refuse any further conversation.

I still have questions. About the past, about her.

But an incredible weight pressed down on his eyelids, and Haruyuki entrusted himself to the warm darkness that visited him, sinking endlessly into the deep abyss of sleep.

The next moment, his head slammed into the floor. He opened his eyes reluctantly.

What the hell? I just laid down; who yanked my pillow out from under me? he thought as he raised his upper body. But his eyes flew open in surprise at the sky on the other side of the curtains, now open wide: It was dyed a beautiful orange and purple.

“Huh?! It’s already morning…?!”

“It is. Good morning, Silver Crow.”

Turning his face toward her voice, Haruyuki saw Sky Raker return to her bed the pillow he was convinced had been yanked out from under his head. She had already put on her white hat and dress.

“G-good morning.” He returned the greeting and asked, “Um, what time is it?”

The sky-blue avatar pointed silently toward the kitchen. A small brass clock sat in the display case on the wall, the hands of which were pointing at five in the morning. Considering the fact that they had laid down right after the sun set the previous night, he calculated that he had slept a full ten hours, but he felt as if he hadn’t even been asleep long enough to dream.

However, the inside of his head did feel refreshed, like he had splashed himself with cold water. In fact, this was actually the most refreshed he could ever remember feeling upon waking. And in the real world, only thirty seconds or so had passed.

“I get it. Sleeping here, that’s a pretty good way to use your points,” he hummed without thinking, and Sky Raker grinned.

“Although you run the risk of someone killing you in your sleep.”

“…Huh?”

“You’re much too late to try and save that head now. I called you five times and you still didn’t wake up.”

So that’s why you pulled that dirty pillow-snatching trick. Nodding his agreement, Haruyuki shrank into himself. “I-I’m sorry. I’ll be sure to wake up next time!”

But Sky Raker returned only a mysterious smile and rolled her wheelchair toward the door.

The Unlimited Neutral Field in the early morning shone with a beauty different from that of dusk. Although the affiliation was still Wasteland, the reddish-brown, rocky mountains were lit up by the morning glow, turned into colossal chunks of raw ruby.

The wheelchair creaked along the lawn wet with morning dew, approached the same bench on the north side as where they had talked the day before, and stopped. Haruyuki moved forward to her side and waited for Sky Raker to speak standing up this time.

The level-eight Burst Linker, former Nega Nebulus member, and current hermit of the accelerated world took a deep breath before beginning, in a voice that was a fair bit sterner. “Silver Crow. We will now begin the Incarnate training.”

“Y-yes. I await your instruction.” Haruyuki dropped his head in a deep bow.

This training alone, learning to use the Incarnate System to control his avatar through nothing but images, was the sole hope left to him. It might take several days, several weeks, but he would master it.

Burning with resolve, a soundtrack like something out of a Hong Kong kung fu movie’s training montage playing in his brain, Haruyuki awaited her first instruction.

However.

“That said, the essential point of the will can be expressed in a single word. Anyone can use the system once they understand this word.”

“…O-okay?” His knees buckled at Sky Raker’s smooth voice. “J-just one…? And then your initiation into the secret art is complete?”

“It is.”

“Please tell me what it is,” he said, naturally enough.

“Of course. The next time you are able to come see me,” was the response he got, so he hurriedly took a step closer.

“N-no, I won’t go back to the real world until you tell me!”

“I didn’t say ‘decided to come see,’ I said ‘able to,’ didn’t I? In other words—” She cut herself off and beckoned him closer, so Haruyuki took another step toward her. The sky-blue hair swung, and the elegant avatar gently touched her right hand to Haruyuki’s back.

“This is what I’m talking about.” She shoved him to the side.

“Huh? Oh! Oh oh!” Haruyuki tottered two steps along the lawn. The third step took him into thin air.

“…Huh?”

“I pray for your health, Corvus.”

The figure of Sky Raker smiling sweetly above him quickly receded. More correctly, Haruyuki’s body plummeted through the sky from the peak of the three-hundred-meter-tall tower.

“Huh? H-hey! Ah!”

He hurried to flap his arms like wings, but naturally, this had no effect. Dragged down by the virtual gravity, he plunged in free fall straight down.

“Ah! Aaaaa—”

Haruyuki died.